The iron rule of planning is: whatever a client or an architect says will happen with a building, won’t. Architects always want to control the future. So do clients. A big, physical building seems a perfect way to bind the course of future events. (“Once we move the company into the new building, then we can use it to limit our growth.”) It never works. The future is no more controllable than it is predictable. The only reliable attitude to take toward the future is that it is profoundly, structurally, unavoidably perverse. The rest of the iron rule is: whatever you are ready for, doesn’t
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